Do They Know it’s (not) Christmas Time at All?

I saw something quite funny when checking out the spam feeds the other day. An attachment kept appearing, once in a while, with a name of Christmas Card.zip. It was making sporadic appearances in the feeds (and the number of spam email messages was quite low), but there were a couple of these odd messages at equally odd hours of the day:

The email message itself was a run-of-the-mill electronic greeting card with an HTML body containing a nice Flash animation—the Flash animation actually comes from a legitimate source (123greetings.com). The email body contains a message asking the user to open the attachment to see who sent the email. Of course, opening the attachment yields a malicious file. The name of the file inside is Christmas Card.htm.exe and it is already detected by Symantec as W32.Ackantta.G@mm.
The question I leave you with is this: are the people behind the Ackannta worm living in some kind of a (continue reading...)